WASHINGTON - From his gray-brick walled compound in northeast Beijing, Ai Weiwei barely felt the tremors from the Sichuan earthquake on May 12, 2008. But within days, as the death toll mounted into the tens of thousands, many of them children buried under the rubble of shabbily built schools, he found himself standing in the ruins of a town destroyed by the 7.9-magnitude quake. For Ai, it was both heartbreaking and an existential moment that would find expression in his iconoclastic works, leading to clashes with Chinese authorities and catapulting him to status as one of the world's most celebrated artists.

Constanze Hasimoglu said she last heard from her daughter, Hattice, in a telephone call immediately after a powerful quake struck this isolated corner of southeastern Turkey. "She said, 'Hello, hello' — she sounded panicked — and then the line went dead," the distraught Hasimoglu recalled Monday. Hasimoglu held vigil near a debris pile where workers drilled and hammered, searching for her daughter and other potential survivors of the earthquake that struck Turkey on Sunday afternoon.

Just before noon on a December morning in 1988, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake shook over 40% of the territory of Armenia, centered in the northern city of Spitak. The temblor leveled entire towns and cities, killed an estimated 25,000 Armenians - two-thirds of them children trapped and crushed in their crumbling schools - and hastened the dissolution of the Soviet Union, of which Armenia was then a part. But the Spitak disaster was more than a geopolitical milestone. The earthquake was, in the words of one researcher, a "psychiatric calamity" that has yielded a trove of knowledge aboutpost-traumatic stress disorder.

Free legal advice will be offered today and Friday to victims of the Sierra Madre earthquake. Members of the disaster relief committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Assn. will be available at the U.S. Small Business Administration's disaster loan assistance office in Arcadia, 657 W. Duarte Road, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day.

U.S. checks donated in Britain to Armenia's earthquake victims were aboard the crashed Pan Am jumbo jet, but not a penny will be lost, a Soviet bank said Thursday. The thousands of dollars in checks, mainly from U.S. companies in Britain, were being flown to the United States for clearance by U.S. banks on Flight 103, said Ray King, deputy general manager of Moscow Narodny Bank in London.

The shaking lasted less than a minute. The aftershocks eventually grew fainter and less frequent. But for thousands of San Fernando Valley residents, the nightmare of the Northridge earthquake has dragged on for more than six maddening years.

Only two weeks ago, Bernardo Turnbull, 28, left his family home in Mexico City to start graduate classes in psychology at Chapman College in Orange. But his mind wasn't on studies Saturday as he volunteered to work all day answering telephones at the Orange County chapter headquarters of the American Red Cross in Santa Ana. "I'm still shaky," he said. "I'm working to stay busy so I don't have time to worry."

Constanze Hasimoglu said she last heard from her daughter, Hattice, in a telephone call immediately after a powerful quake struck this isolated corner of southeastern Turkey. "She said, 'Hello, hello' — she sounded panicked — and then the line went dead," the distraught Hasimoglu recalled Monday. Hasimoglu held vigil near a debris pile where workers drilled and hammered, searching for her daughter and other potential survivors of the earthquake that struck Turkey on Sunday afternoon.

Naoko Sugimoto has heard the news through the nation's fledgling mental health grapevine, ominous reports of suicides in the region devastated by last month's magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami. It's a trickle she fears may soon become a river: the farmer who hanged himself, distressed about a cabbage harvest ruined by radioactive fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant; the overworked government worker near the complex who took his life; the father who killed himself after a fruitless search for his child after the tsunami.

Japan's Red Cross has collected more than $1 billion in the first three weeks after the massive earthquake and tsunami but has yet to distribute any funds directly to victims, prompting Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano to urge Sunday that the process be accelerated. Meanwhile, the operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant reported no significant progress in stopping the leak of radioactive water into the sea. Tokyo Electric Power Co. officials think the leak has been coming from a concrete pit holding power cables near reactor No. 2, and attempted Sunday to seal a crack there with a special polymer.

March 14, 2011 | By Barbara Demick and Mark Magnier, Los Angeles Times

The lists name survivors housed in evacuation centers, long printed lists hanging from bulletin boards in buildings that usually serve as culture halls, junior high schools and city government headquarters. Then there are the makeshift notes, written in green and red felt pen, messages to reassure loved ones who may also have survived. "Otomo Takako here," says one among the many ringing the double doors of the Natori City Hall. "Please don't worry about us. We are safe. " "I'm in the offices of the Tire-Off" company, reads another.

Former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier broke his silence Friday, five days after arriving unexpectedly in his Caribbean birthplace, expressing condolences for the victims of last year's earthquake and a wish to participate in the struggle for the country's reconstruction. The aging and frail former "president for life," known as "Baby Doc," read softly from a prepared statement. He glanced periodically at the crowd of journalists packed into the entryway of the luxurious guesthouse he now inhabits in the hills of Port-au-Prince.

Doctors and aid workers scrambled Friday to rein in a cholera outbreak in central Haiti that has killed 140 people, while warning that the crisis probably would get worse in a country where tent camps are still teeming with people displaced by the January earthquake. "There's no reason to anticipate that this wouldn't spread widely," said Joia Mukherjee, chief medical officer for Partners In Health, a Boston-based relief organization that runs three hospitals in the area. The acute bacterial illness, spread primarily through contaminated drinking water, has struck more than 2,000 people throughout the farming valley along the Artibonite River, with the highest number in the port city of St. Marc.

If it weren't hard enough looking after 2,000 earthquake victims crammed into a sweltering schoolyard, Jean Robert Charles now has to worry about rapists. Charles is the de facto mayor of a tent settlement that fills a school and a soccer field in the gang-plagued Matisan section of the Haitian capital. A recent series of rapes has created fear in his camp and others nearby, adding crime and safety to the long list of anxieties facing residents displaced by the Jan. 12 earthquake.

Two dozen Haitian students manage a ragged unison in their stab at English. " Today we go to school," they pronounce, more or less as one. Their instructor approves and gives the next cue. "In school I will learn to write." "In school I will learn to write," the students echo. "The teacher will help me." "The teacher will help me," the Haitians offer in return. On this day, the teacher, Justin Purnell, sits 1,300 miles away in Asheville, N.C. The students are packed into a bare-bones classroom in Port-au-Prince, watching and answering via video on a laptop computer propped in front of them.